Taste Champagne London 2020 Tasting Book

international wine communicator of the year Tyson Stelzer presents tast e champagne london 2020 the biggest global champagne showcase Out Now Showcasing 286 Cuvées From 55 Champagne Houses Champagne’s biggest challenges Heidsieck & Co. Monopole _________ 68 and opportunities of 2020 _______ 2 Héloïse Lloris ______________________ 59 Champagne Maps ___________________ 10 Henri Giraud _______________________ 71 Taste Champagne Venue Map ______ 18 Henriot _____________________________ 72 Jacquesson __________________________ 74 Directory of Contacts ___________ 105 Jeeper ________________________________ 76 Wine Events with Tyson _________ 111 Joseph Perrier ______________________ 77 Alexandre Bonnet __________________ 21 Lanson ______________________________ 34 André Clouet _______________________ 22 Laurent-Perrier ____________________ 79 AR Lenoble __________________________ 23 Louis Roederer _____________________ 81 AYALA ________________________________ 26 Mailly Grand Cru __________________ 83 Beaumont des Crayères ____________ 28 Moët & Chandon ___________________ 84 Besserat de Bellefon _______________ 32 Mumm _______________________________ 86 Billecart-Salmon ___________________ 36 Palmer & Co _________________________ 88 Boizel _______________________________ 38 Paul Bara ____________________________ 24 Bollinger ___________________________ 27 Perrier-Jouët _______________________ 87 Bonnaire ____________________________ 40 Philippe Glavier _____________________ 89 Bruno Paillard _____________________ 41 Philipponnat ________________________ 91 Canard-Duchêne ___________________ 42 Pierre Gimonnet & Fils _____________ 92 Castelnau ___________________________ 44 Piper-Heidsieck _____________________ 94 Cattier ______________________________ 48 Pol Roger ___________________________ 95 Charles Heidsieck __________________ 49 Pommery ____________________________ 69 Collet _______________________________ 50 Roger-Constant Lemaire __________ 96 Delamotte __________________________ 52 Taittinger __________________________ 97 Deutz ________________________________ 53 Thiénot _____________________________ 43 Devaux ______________________________ 54 Tsarine ______________________________ 35 Dumangin J. Fils ____________________ 56 Vazart-Coquart ____________________ 99 Duval-Leroy _________________________ 60 Veuve Clicquot _____________________ 85 Franck Bonville ____________________ 62 Veuve Fourny & Fils _______________ 100 Gardet ______________________________ 64 Vilmart & Cie ______________________ 102 Gosset _______________________________ 66 Vincent d’Astrée ___________________ 30 tastechampagne tastechampevent 1 Champagne’s big challenges and opportunities of 2020 Tyson Stelzer Taste Champagne London 2020 comes at a crucial and dynamic moment for champagne in the UK. Champagne is fast on the move and never before has an annual update been more pertinent. No French wine region has been revolutionised over the past two decades as dramatically as Champagne. And no appellation has needed it more desperately. Champagne is a very different place to what it was 20 years ago, or even five years ago. The dynamic on the ground in Champagne is ever more complex and changing rapidly. Champagne finds itself in a very difficult place climatically, politically and economically in 2020. And yet, impossibly and triumphantly, Champagne is emphatically in the best place today that it has ever been. Not in spite of the rising challenges it is facing on so many fronts, but because of them. Across the sweep of history, it has been during the eras of prosperity that Champagne has become notoriously complacent in its viticulture, lazy in its winemaking and tiresomely fabricated in its marketing, for which it has been widely and rightly chastised. And it has been from times of hardship that Champagne has made its greatest advances. Almost a century ago, it was ultimately out of the crisis of phylloxera that Champagne’s appellation system was born. The string of vintages that followed the region’s obliteration during World War II rank among some of the greatest of the century. And the global financial crisis of the past decade provided the much-needed impetus for Champagne to get its supply and demand balance in order and rethink the expansion of its appellation. Champagne’s modern challenges in climate politics and economics have not been insubstantial. In response, its top players have never worked harder and have never been stronger. Over the past decade, the region has entered a phase of fundamental change in the way its grapes are grown and sourced, the way its wines are made, how its companies are structured and even how and where its cuvées are sold. Each of these topics is unravelled in the coming pages, and the full depth of this discussion is detailed in the introductory chapters of The Champagne Guide 2020-2021. Aÿ harvest 2019 2 Tyson Stelzer Presents Taste Champagne 2020 Sunburnt grapes in Cumières, harvest 2019 Climate in crisis Champagne’s climate is in crisis, to profound and unprecedented extremes, becoming dramatically more extreme and unpredictable over the past three decades, and this is a bigger concern for the region’s vineyards than an increase in temperature of close to 1.2oC. The past five vintages have exemplified just how erratic the weather has become, and each for vastly disparate reasons. The 2016 season brought catastrophic frost, hail and rain, inflicting the most widespread devastation in history, only to be outdone by the toughest season in living memory the very next year, decimated by the worst rot Champagne has ever seen. There was rejoicing in the streets when 2018 brought record yields of clean fruit of unprecedented ripeness, but enthusiasm waned when vins clairs lacked acidity and endurance. The 2019 harvest looks to be the best of them all, despite yields smashed by an all-time record late-July heatwave of 42oC that shrivelled grapes to raisins. Green champagne For decades, Champagne has been the laughing stock of responsible growers everywhere, notoriously piling on herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, fertilisers and even Parisian rubbish to shamelessly bolster its poor vines to ludicrous yields. But the slow march to change is gathering momentum on the hillsides of Champagne, and in the past two years it has intensified like never before. Though not as you might expect. Vintage 2017 was the worst harvest in memory, decimated by rot. It proved to be the wake-up call that Champagne had to have. The triumphant heroes of this season were sustainably managed vines of respectable yields, setting a precedent that is inspiring otherwise reluctant growers to follow. ‘The large houses are planting grasses in the mid-rows, ploughing and taking better care of the vines than the small growers,’ revealed president of Champagne’s organic body, Association des Champagnes Biologiques, Pascal Doquet. tastechampagne tastechampevent 3 Radical pioneers like Anselme Selosse and Pierre Larmandier were instrumental among a small band of like-minded growers who inspired a generation of Champenois to embrace responsible viticulture. Their story is well familiar, and rightfully celebrated. Now a new chapter is unfolding, with an unexpected and dramatic twist. The romanticised aura of growers as the heroes who are saving Champagne from the industrialised menace of the houses has long been the rhetoric of the wine world. Not only is this a fundamentally flawed and simplistic misconception, the truth today is that precisely the opposite is playing out between the vines. The leaders in sustainability in the vines and the wines of Champagne today, those whose vineyards set the pace in thwarting chemical intervention and who inspire, encourage, cajole and incentivise their partners to take up the challenge and step into a new millennium of responsibility are, with a small number of notably famous exceptions, not by and large the growers themselves, but the houses and cooperatives, even and most notably some of the biggest players of all, and most of all Louis Roederer and Veuve Clicquot. Champagne established sustainable certification as an option to go halfway to organics, a good interim step, though far from sufficiently rigorous to be an adequate end point in itself. Meanwhile, all of Champagne’s top houses and growers have already fully eradicated herbicides in their own vineyards. The Comité Champagne aspires to completely eradicate herbicides by 2025, and has already made some progress toward this goal. Twenty percent of Champagne vineyards are certified sustainable, with a goal of 100% by 2030. The region halved its use of nitrogen fertilisers in the first 15 years of this century, and pesticides have now been almost completely eradicated, thanks to pheromone sexual confusion techniques. 4Pascal Doquet, winter 2019 Tyson Stelzer Presents Taste Champagne 2020 Fleury harvest 2019 Wildly changing global economies In the market, global forces continue to buffet Champagne, and 2018 marked a milestone turning point for the balance of champagne sales. A depressed French market collided with Brexit and, for the first time in history, not only did champagne exports exceed French sales, but exports to countries outside the European Union exceeded those within (excluding France). Fifteen years ago, exports represented barely more than one-third of the region’s production. This trend will only increase, with some observers predicting that within twenty years, Champagne could be exporting as much as two-thirds of its production. Has

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